[
    {
        "id": 207280,
        "series_id": 26,
        "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine",
        "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊",
        "series_use_hku_proxy": false,
        "document_key": "RAS-1975",
        "page_number": 48,
        "title": "RAS-1975",
        "content_text": "40\n\nWELLINGTON K. K. CHAN\n\ncommunity in the major commercial centres helped the regional governments to become more independent of, and ultimately even more powerful than, the central government. In this way, merchant organisations helped the growth of political regionalism even as they advanced the cause of social and economic integration.\n\nWe began this study of Chinese merchant organisations on the premise that they reflected not only great resilience as institutions, but also the flexibility of their organisers in adopting changes consistent with changing values and changing times. To synchronise values and the environmental conditions, however, proved to be highly intractable. In late imperial China, as society made fast and momentous changes towards regionalism, warlordism and political illegitimacy, merchant organisations adjusted admirably, but somehow failed to keep pace with the rapidly changing environment. Our conclusion then is to suggest that indeed both men and institutions showed great resilience, but that in times of great social and political stress, there were limits as to what they could accomplish.\n\nNOTES\n\n1 See, e.g. Thomas A. Metzger's \"The Organizational Capabilities of the Ch'ing State in the Field of Commerce: The Liang-huai Salt Monopoly, 1740-1840,\" in W. E. Willmott, ed., Economic Organization in Chinese Society (Stanford, 1972), pp. 9-45, showing how the organizational flexibility of the Liang-huai salt administration was matched by the manipulative skills and non-conformist behavior of its administrators; and John E. Schrecker, Imperialism and Chinese Nationalism: Germany in Shantung (Cambridge, Mass., 1971) for emphasizing comparable success by late Ch'ing foreign policy institutions and officials.\n\n2 Ch'üan Han-sheng, Chung-kuo hang-hui chih-tu shih (An institutional history of the Chinese guilds) (Shanghai, 1934), pp. 29-36.\n\n3 H. B. Morse, The Gilds of China (London, 1909), pp. 35-48; Ho Ping-ti, Chung-kuo hui-kuan shih-lun (A historical survey of Landsmannschaften in China) (Taipei, 1966). The German term \"Landsmannschaft\" used by Professor Ho for \"hui-kuan\" was first suggested by D. J. MacGowan in his \"Chinese Guilds or Chambers of Commerce and Trade Unions,\" Journal of North-China Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, vol. 21 (1888-89).\n\n4 Chung-hsü Hsi-hsien hui-kuan lu (A repeat edition of the continuation to the records of the Hsi-hsien Landsmannschaft) (n.p., 1834), “hsü-lu hou-chi,” pp. 13a, 16b, 19a, 22b; \"hsin-chi,\" pp. 3b-5b, 12a.",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1975.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/j0995146d",
        "rank": 0
    },
    {
        "id": 212011,
        "series_id": 26,
        "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine",
        "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊",
        "series_use_hku_proxy": false,
        "document_key": "RAS-1989",
        "page_number": 426,
        "title": "RAS-1989",
        "content_text": "401\n\nconnections between the local guilds, membership on the committee and the emergence of a Chinese business elite, the importance of a Chinese alternative to the colonial government which the Tung Wah essentially represented, and the links between traditional Chinese political culture and the symbols and trappings of authority with which committee members sought to enhance their status. It would be interesting to see how these patterns of social control changed after the colonial government introduced more controls over the hospital in 1896. But that is another story. Dr. Sinn's book will stand as the definitive study of the early history of the hospital and it is essential reading for anyone wishing to understand Hong Kong society and politics in the nineteenth century.\n\nIAN SCOTT, University of Hong Kong\n\nPaul A. Cohen and Merle Goldman, eds., Ideas Across Cultures: Essays On Chinese Thought In Honor of Benjamin I. Schwartz. Cambridge, Massachusetts and London: Harvard University Press, 1990. xi + 400 pp. Index.\n\nThis Festschrift for the recently retired Harvard professor of Chinese history and political science, after nearly four decades of teaching and writing, is a genuine tribute to the iconoclastic Schwartzian tradition. All ten articles, written by former students of the last three decades, address questions in Chinese studies which engage broad ranges of comparison with other Asian and Western expressions, in search of Schwartz's 'possibility of a universal human discourse', (p. 314). In every case, the thematic questions take Schwartz's previous work as a starting point from which to embellish, extrapolate or challenge academic evaluations of China. Raising issues from such diverse fields as Shang oracular bones, Mo-ist and Confucian utilitarianism, medieval metaphysics, folk-opera in the 1920s, non-Eurocentric Marxist theory and recent democratic overtures in the People's Republic, the authors create a literary monument to the probing and sensitive studies of their teacher. Precisely because of these varying degrees of reference to the Schwartzian corpus and the unusual breadth of themes, the lack of an exhaustive bibliography related to the honored scholar and the absence of a Chinese glossary are regrettable.\n\nThe first and ninth articles, by Hao Chang and Thomas Metzger, pinpoint their correctives to Schwartz's claims. Chang repeats a claim already made in 1985 that the ‘axial age' (qua Karl Jaspers) of Chinese",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1989.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/8336pm92h",
        "rank": 0
    },
    {
        "id": 212012,
        "series_id": 26,
        "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine",
        "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊",
        "series_use_hku_proxy": false,
        "document_key": "RAS-1989",
        "page_number": 427,
        "title": "RAS-1989",
        "content_text": "402\n\ncivilization occurred during the time of Confucius and not, as Schwartz argued in his latest book, The World Of Thought In Ancient China (1985), half a millennium earlier in the Western Zhou. Metzger underlines foundations for individual moral autonomy in traditional Chinese thought, a position contradicting the general evaluation (supported by Schwartz) that 'Confucian norms emphasized the importance of the group at the expense of the individual's freedom, spontaneity, creativity and moral autonomy', (p. 263). The fact that Chang's analysis uncovers no decisive break with tradition, but only a 'counter-tendency' to the cosmological myth which legitimated imperial rule (pp. 30-31), manifests the need to question the usefulness of positing an axial age when applied to pre-Qin cultures. Studies edited by Eisenstadt have recognized this methodological dilemma, noting the difficulty of identifying a period of radical metaphysical construction and social repositioning during Confucius' era. This leaves open the possibility that Schwartz's location of the major shift in the earlier period of the sage kings, in spite of oracular bone evidence to the contrary (pp. 18-19), may yet identify an important option. Metzger's challenge, on the other hand, unveils a leitmotif which weaves the polychronic essays into a single tapestry: the question of the relationship between modernity and China.\n\nThese essays being divided into four general sections entitled 'Thought', 'Literature and Culture', 'Political Theory', and 'Culture and Methodology' — tend to converge on either characterizing the process of modernization in some dimension of Chinese societies or evaluating the methods scholars have employed to illuminate China's status in the modern world. These convergences are imbedded in comparative discussions of intriguing complexity, making this thread less easy to identify at times. Nevertheless, recourse to the touchstone of modernity is a central feature of the volume. In fact, the discussion regarding it is not always complementary.\n\nDon Wyatt, like Metzger, locates a singular continuity in Confucianism: Confucian language is \"this-worldly\", especially in its use of analogical arguments, (pp. 42-57). Surprisingly, perhaps, this does not mean that Confucianists (especially in the Song) did not address metaphysical, even other-worldly, ideas. Emphasizing this kind of 'language consensus' which sinologists have regularly typified as this-worldly, Wyatt goes so far as to claim that, although Confucian society was clearly stratified, no class-bound structures are evident in Confucian language, (p. 61). Whether or not this is still the case, this assertion",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1989.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/8336pm92h",
        "rank": 0
    },
    {
        "id": 212013,
        "series_id": 26,
        "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine",
        "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊",
        "series_use_hku_proxy": false,
        "document_key": "RAS-1989",
        "page_number": 428,
        "title": "RAS-1989",
        "content_text": "403\n\nis starkly countered by David Arkush's study of Hebei village opera in the twenties. Concluding his perceptive study of the underside of China's recent history, Arkush observes that, at least in rural northern China, 'the moral categories and values of the ruling elites did not totally dominate the thinking of the subordinate classes', (p. 105). The illustrations presented to support this claim reveal not only a rupture in thought but also in language. How true was this of the pre-Republican period? Do these folk themes reflect a popular contrapuntal, an unprinted Zhuangziese, which actually questioned the values and concepts inherent in Confucian discourse?\n\nThe ‘optimistic this-worldliness' Metzger discovers as a continuous element of Chinese scholars' historiography and cultural analysis tends to bypass Wyatt's identification of metaphysical themes which, though 'premodern', are still approached without intellectual incredulity by some of these same scholars. Metzger recognizes this fact, but believes that an issue more important than general philosophical discussions of human nature is the actual production of ‘self-propelled adults' in Chinese society, (p. 284). These morally autonomous leaders are in fact the reason why China could maintain its cultural continuity as well as uphold a normative vision of culture for her future generations. Whether in premodern China or in Mao's Republic, this salient feature of the morally autonomous individual can be observed. Metzger draws this to a point by announcing that modern China has 'fully merged with liberalism and humanism', (p. 288).\n\nThis evaluation is explicitly denied by Leo Ou-Fan Lee, who carefully distinguishes between the adoption of 'historical modernism' by Chinese intellectuals in the twentieth century (i.e. progressive history) and their general irresponsiveness to Western 'esthetic modernism', (pp. 109 ff). Examples of the latter are few and far between, as Jeffrey Kinkey's study of a young writer in the eighties affirms. Metzger was more reserved in his judgement earlier in his essay, admitting that China, following Alistair McIntyre's criteria for modernity, had only committed herself to socialism and not to existentialism or some form of ethical scepticism, (pp. 269, 279). Metzger's promotion of an ‘anti-teleological' historical methodology as the proper tool for more critical studies of China by Chinese intellectuals flies in the face of Lee's awareness of the salient historically progressive element in China's modern consciousness. The suggestion may well be beneficial, but it sets up a tension between Chinese and non-Chinese forms of modernity. It seems a poignant truth that",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1989.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/8336pm92h",
        "rank": 0
    },
    {
        "id": 212014,
        "series_id": 26,
        "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine",
        "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊",
        "series_use_hku_proxy": false,
        "document_key": "RAS-1989",
        "page_number": 429,
        "title": "RAS-1989",
        "content_text": "Metzger's approach is essentially Western in identifying values promoting Western forms of modernity (as in the writings of the Hong Kong historian, Lau Siu-guang p. 289), while overlooking some other important alternatives—a point made by Andrew Nathan (p. 310).\n\nTwo outstanding articles extend further the methodological issues in evaluating modern China, suggesting an important lacuna in reflecting on Schwartz's academic achievements. Germaine Hoston's tour de force, a comparative study of Chinese, Japanese, South American, and African Marxisms, rests not only in the cultural pluralities she has in her grasp but also in her reassessment of the spiritual dimensions of Marxist, and specifically Chinese and Japanese Marxist, theories (pp. 169-220). Asian Marxists uncovered a wealth of sympathy for certain spiritual dimensions, much like Liberation theologians, including the full absorption by Japanese Marxists of elements of kokutai ('national polity', pp. 193-195). A similarly admirable essay by Andrew Nathan untangles the conflict between cultural relativism and ‘evaluative universalism’, that is, forming judgements in cross-cultural studies on the basis of values the investigator believes to be valid (p. 295). The arguments against imposing 'foreign' values on China are dismantled with great precision and insightful thoroughness, covering issues raised over the last thirty years in sinological circles. Although one laments the failure of Nathan to explicitly respond to the tainting of values by ideologically-laden choices—an issue of which he, as a political scientist, is certainly aware—perceptive readers should be able to extrapolate the arguments presented to include this dimension. Both Hoston and Nathan suggest a logical and/or spiritual dimension which is not explicitly located in Schwartz's thought (except in passing by the editors, p. 3).\n\nThe relation of Schwartz's Jewish faith to his Chinese interests as a historian and political scientist is worthy of reflection because this is a somewhat unusual junction of ideas in itself and because it may provide a key to at least one aspect of Schwartz's restlessness with any unquestioned scholarly assumption. Schwartz's critical awareness of the connections between Mao and Confucianism may find some parallel in his confrontative effort in locating a connection between Hannah Arendt's Marxism and her Jewishness (see Dissent 17:2 (March/April 1970), pp. 144-161). Ideological commitments may overshadow traditional inheritances, but they cannot by that means necessarily avoid all influences and misjudgements. Schwartz's sensitivity to the distortion of Judaism evident in Arendt's 'religion of politics' may well reflect a",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1989.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/8336pm92h",
        "rank": 0
    }
]